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Facebook’s Secret Rulebook for Global Political Speech
- snowmaker 8y agoThe look at the actual rulebook is fascinating. It reminds me a bit of Google's guidelines to the outsourced workforce that hand-reviews search results (https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en//insidesearch/howsearchworks/assets/searchqualityevaluatorguidelines.pdf https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en...). I wonder if Facebook has had to hire political experts in every region to draft these guidelines. I would think you would need a sizable task force of political experts to have the necessary expertise to do this accurately for every country in the world.
- nkozyra 8y agoWow that is a fascinating link, how have I have seen this before.
- quanticle 8y agoThe article indicates that all the rules are made centrally, in Menlo Park. I would find it very surprising if they had enough consultants to come up with comprehensive, culturally aware guidelines that allow moderators to make nuanced decisions about what to ban and what to leave up. Instead, their goal seems to be keeping Facebook out of trouble. As long as they can point to a guideline that says that hate group X is banned, they're covered. To Facebook, the goal isn't to prevent the transmission of hate speech. The goal is to stop Facebook from being perceived as a vehicle to transmit hate speech. Facebook executives know that in advertising, perception overrides reality. They're willing to do whatever it takes to keep up the perception that Facebook is doing everything in its power to stop hate speech, even if those measures have little or no practical impact (or even if they backfire and suppress speech that should be allowed).
- stevenicr 8y agoI was thinking about that google rule book when responding to this recent hn thing here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18773263 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18773263 about google (Google Is Smashing Multi-Discipline Websites to Combat Fake News), The truly terrible thing is that most people do not know that F and G are censoring to the degrees they are. Most (99.9%?) - don't know that there is a group of human moderators and site rankers that are trying to follow some esoteric multi-page set of guidelines to determine what is shown and what is not shown. We know nothing of these people who are choosing what gets seen or not seen on our state / country / city, etc. What are their political leanings? religious views? How much time are these people given to decide if something you say or think you are going to hear is blocked? How much do these people make for making these important decisions? What is their education level? What about those things for the people who make these sets of rules. Also, how are these things affecting the algorithms? These things matter. The lack of transparency is bad for users and those who think they speaking to their audience.
- bduerst 8y agoWhile the individual examples listed here are not good, what is the false-positive and false-negative rates for FB's method of censorship? Globally scaling hate-speech censorship is a problem that many content websites (Youtube, Twitter, etc.) face. This article with it's leaked deck and false-positive examples seems like it's trying to generate shock at "how the sausage gets made". Any process involving humans will have outliers, but the question is, how effective is the process really?
- gojomo 8y agoIf you don't believe in censoring communications between a willing-speaker & willing-listener, anything they do has a 100% false-positive rate.
- village-idiot 8y agoThere are many jurisdictions where that’s a no-go.
- bduerst 8y agoIf only Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube were completely full of willing listeners for hate speech, then that might be applicable. Hate groups aren't sending private forum messages to each other, they're broadcasting Even John Stuart Mill, a founding philosopher of free speech, postulated that speech needs to be curtailed when the expression harms others.
- assblaster 8y agoWords can not be violent. If you think one person being offended means speakers must be silenced, then you're on a dangerous pathway to fascism.
- contras1970 8y ago> Words can not be violent. sure, sure. please explain how Facebook did not contribute to the Rohingya "situation" in [Myanmar]. please document how violence-inciting speech never helps spark actual violence (xenophobic violence everywhere since the dawn of speech). i know, i know... guns don't kill people, people kill people. the issue is: we're all latent murderers. civilization is a very thin veneer. if we were all perfectly rational, maybe we could all get along much better. but were but speaking [animals] and need all help we can get to maintain our outward civility. i know it's a very fine line to tread, but we must not conflate the baby with the bathwater. [Myanmar]: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebook-genocide.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo... [animals]: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/believe https://theoatmeal.com/comics/believe
- mc32 8y agoThey can’t have this responsibility. It gives them too much centralized power and fails to devolve power locally where people are better fit to understanding the audience and the content. I really think the answer is in localized, community-based moderation (with appeals to localized corp) like forums used to be. Obviously that goes against their will to control every aspect of their platform.
- general8bitso 8y agoAgreed. We need online communities.
- village-idiot 8y agoI’m not convinced that’s true anymore.
- nradov 8y agoWell there are localized social networks in countries where Facebook is blocked or just unpopular. WeChat in China, VKontakte in Russia. I'm not sure that's any better? What does localized even mean anymore, and who should decide whether someone is sufficiently "local" to qualify as a moderator?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- mc32 8y agoDevolving moderation on national level (as opposed to centralized global) would be a start, but also self selecting groups. If you choose to be in a Singaporean page, group, forum, etc., you abide by their localization.
- nradov 8y agoWhat is a "national" level? What nation should set content moderation standards for conflict zones and disputed territories such as Palestine, Tibet, Taiwan, Syria, Nagorno-Karabakh, Kosovo, Western Sahara, etc? How about territories within nations? Should the same moderation standards apply to Mississippi and California? There are no clear right or wrong standards here. Any changes are as likely to make things worse as better due to unintended consequences. The Facebook employees in Menlo Park have made some bad decisions on occasion but they at least try to do the right thing most of the time within the constraints imposed by their business model. National authorities often have more sinister motives.
- jmspring 8y agoHaving a bunch of likely millenial aged individuals with limited life experience based in Menlo Park to have a say in discourse that crosses so many boundaries? What could possibly go wrong?
- beatpanda 8y agoThis is exactly why Silicon Valley engineers, and engineers generally, need to stop being so dismissive of people with "useless" liberal arts educations, and instead bring in sociologists and anthropologists to think through these processes in a comprehensive way. I'm being downvoted into oblivion elsewhere on this site for suggesting this, but I feel like it's a very obvious move for tech companies that have this problem.
- jmspring 8y agoI have no problem with anthropologists and those in the liberal arts employed when there are skills they have that help a company. Bubble-1, many humanities students were hired around working with content. That wasn't a bad thing. As I said in another post, companies also actually used to hire people outside the tech bubble to deal with things like categorization of websites, etc. That went away once they could achieve a certain percentage with cheap labor.
- sunsetMurk 8y ago..and now with ML/etc.!
- nradov 8y agoClassical liberal arts educations are tremendously valuable in teaching people how to think critically. However when we're dealing with complex emergent systems no one is capable of reliably predicting problems regardless of how much education in sociology and anthropology they have. Active monitoring and fast responses are the only viable approach.
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- aisofteng 8y ago>They consist of dozens of unorganized PowerPoint presentations and Excel spreadsheets with bureaucratic titles like “Western Balkans Hate Orgs and Figures” and “Credible Violence: Implementation standards.” >In Pakistan, moderators were told to watch some parties and their supporters for prohibited speech. >In another email, moderators were told to hunt down and remove rumors wrongly accusing an Israeli soldier of killing a Palestinian medic. These are very similar to the information collected by and activities engaged in by a state intelligence organization.
- baybal2 8y agoHah, I googled those titles just an hour ago, and there were few random pdfs, and powerpoints. Now, not a single one.
- makosdv 8y agoThe thing that troubles me the most is the hubris of Facebook to think that they can even attempt to define and enforce speech codes. It is their site, so they can do what they want, but I can also do what I want and not use it. Given Facebook's massive drop in stock price this year, it seems like their investors think Facebook is following the wrong path as well.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- mactyler 8y ago“...the hubris of facebook to think that they can even attempt to define and enforce speech codes?” What about this is hubris? Wouldnt you argue they have a responsibility to try? Wouldnt it be hubris to build such a powerful platform and not think to care about minimizing the amount of damage malicious actors could do with it?
- monochromatic 8y agoLord no, I would not argue that they have a responsibility to try to enforce speech codes.
- hyperdunc 8y agoFacebook thinks it can push its own moral standards for speech on users while at the same time repeatedly compromising the privacy and data of users. And Facebook does this without a hint of recognition that such imposition will be (and already is) being used as a political weapon against dissident voices. That's hubris.
- mactyler 8y agoI feel like you’re personifying “facebook” itself a bit as a sole entity when in reality its composed of thousands of individual people each with their own ethics and viewpoints so its not really like those are the same people working on privacy and suppressing hate speech, which I feel like would be somewhat of a necessity for your point. Really, everyone at that company is doing their individual best at their respective responsibilities to varying levels of success. But that really isn’t a coordinated calculated effort beyond what each person brings to the table.
- charliebrownau 8y agoGday Platforms that censor speech:- * Facebook * Twitter * Google * Youtube * TUMBLR * Pateron * Stripe * Paypal * Twitch * Spotify * Apple * pin interest * LinkedIn * Mailchimp * Wordpress * mastodon * azure * Mastercard * Godaddy * MEDIUM * Shopify * Cloudflare * pusher * WIKI * Reddit * teespring * Slack * GOFUNDME
- 50656E6973 8y ago* HN
- walrus01 8y agoI dearly wish the NY times would share this trove of Excel sheets and PowerPoints as a torrent. Let people view all of them.
- snowmaker 8y agoThere are probably legal issues preventing them do from doing so. I'm not super familiar with this area of law, but the snippets they shared probably fall into some analogue of fair use, while the full documents would be a clear breach of trade secret laws.
- ishjoh 8y agothis is what I was really hoping for as well. I'd like to read through those documents myself to see exactly what rules they have come up with. This way the NY Times stays the gate keeper and they will like drip a few more articles out regarding this very topic.
- mactyler 8y agoSeems like a pretty challenging task for anyone, also 1500 pages sounds like a good start, it would be nice if anyone who feels really strongly about the problems of this situation and wants to help out in a productive manner to read all of the pages and offer suggestions on how to improve it, maybe even upload some openly contributable global attempt at a “unified” (at least in distribution) agreed upon ethical core. Somewhat like the geneva convention did for conventional warfare, but for discourse through digital platforms different networks could adopt and reference.
- 40acres 8y agoI commend Facebook for allocating more resources to enforce its community standards, what's the point in outlining standards if there is no enforcement? I'm not surprised that the initial implementation has had some rough patches. For this effort to be successful Facebook and other platforms are going to have to heavily invest in building relationships with cultural experts and stakeholders in hundreds of different countries and regions, each region has it's own unique history and flash-points, it's best to understand these from folks who are on the ground rather than overworked moderators and engineers in Menlo Park. Facebook got to where it is by being a centralized social platform, but successful community standards enforcement at this level will take a more decentralized, hyper-local approach. Also, similarly to how large tech companies publish yearly reports on diversity metrics and data requests from governments, if Facebook is really going to make this effort a priority they should publish a report detailing its efforts.
- quanticle 8y agoThe problem is that nothing that Facebook does will actually solve the problem. The solution that will actually solve the problem, having different social networks, with different community standards for each, is antithetical to Facebook's existence. Facebook will continue to make more PowerPoint presentations and hire more outsourced content moderators in a desperate attempt to make the unworkable work... or at least be seen putting in the effort until the the political controversies have blown over.
- chriscappuccio 8y agoWhat a fucking nightmare.
- fromthestart 8y agoWe can barely agree on what constitutes hate speech in the U.S.; fb is expecting to define and police hate speech globally?
- rntz 8y agoFrom Facebook's perspective, what is the alternative? _Not_ trying to define censorship guidelines - and consequently (as we saw in Myanmar) enabling genocide?
- flyingswift 8y agoDamned if they try, damned if they don't
- white-flame 8y agoThat would be the route of framing themselves as a common carrier, as opposed to the current model of a content-promoting, editorializing publisher.
- 50656E6973 8y ago>what is the alternative? How about not having a news feed algorithm and business model that promotes and profits from outrage and negative emotional contagions? https://www.forbes.com/sites/gregorymcneal/2014/06/28/facebook-manipulated-user-news-feeds-to-create-emotional-contagion/#322d350e39dc https://www.forbes.com/sites/gregorymcneal/2014/06/28/facebo...
- snowmaker 8y agoWell, they operate globally and are under media and political pressure globally, so yes, they have no choice but to try to do that.
- ummonk 8y agoNot to mention legal pressure, given that most of the world bans hate speech. (Japan is the only other country in the world that I've found which has a strong protection for free speech equivalent to the US, and they got it because the constitution was drafted after the US victory in WW2)
- selimthegrim 8y agoSamiul Haq was murdered shortly after the election in Pakistan. Let’s give Facebook some credit for exercising due caution there.
- Steko 8y agoWhoever wrote their rulebook used Apple's emoji instead of Facebook's own.
- EGreg 8y agoThe problem as usual is centralization on the Web. That’s what caused the VCs to fund Facebook and why it became this behemoth. (Peter Thiel thinks a monopoly is awesome.) Take for example a law passed earlier this year which required networks to remove posts dealing with child trafficking. The EFF and many free speech advocates went ballistic: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/03/how-congress-censored-internet https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/03/how-congress-censored-... But what if we had open source software that any small community could use to run their own Facebook-like social network? Look, Wordpress has been around for 15 year and people have figured out how to clean up their own blog spam. Communities like HN or a local village can easily police their own posts. Local communities are also able to know a local language and local customs and laws. The problem is centralization.
- zakum1 8y agoNoble aspirations (including those of the founding fathers of the US) that rational dialogue is the answer and not censorship need to be reinterpreted in a Facebook-world where dialogue is largely impossible. It demands a new citizenship, which I believe requires us to eschew platforms like Facebook, not because we want to turn back the clock, but because by their nature they are incapable of supporting true social dialogue. It isn’t a question of censorship, it is a personal question of ethical standards.
- sayno3 8y agoBy the logic of this new system, if I give someone the opportunity to steal or do drugs (bait car, free drugs), they "get what's coming to them"; but if I say words that inspire someone to steal or do drugs, then I am guilty in the same way as yelling "fire" in a crowded theater? Maybe we should ramp up the propaganda and hate-speech and let all these lower life forms take care of themselves (not serious so don't ramp up the psych-torture, big brother is love is the law is to walk on two legs).
- lwf 8y agoNote this is mostly (entirely?) old news, first reported by Motherboard. c.f. https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/xwk9zd/how-facebook-content-moderation-works https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/xwk9zd/how-facebo... (via https://twitter.com/josephfcox/status/1078443875784683521 https://twitter.com/josephfcox/status/1078443875784683521 )
- djohnston 8y agoi'll save you the click, tldr: facebook is trying to solve an unsolvable problem, they've made some mistakes as 2 billion people have a lot of different ideas about what constitutes a good or bad decision, but no one has anything better to offer, including the author of the article.
- scarejunba 8y agoHow does everyone have so much trouble with Facebook and Twitter? I have both and have used both for years and I know that both require you to pick what you want to look at. I exhaust my Twitter feed in seconds and then have nothing to look at. Both my FB feed and my Twitter feed are more heartwarming, adorable, funny, or touching than angry or whatever. Maybe all of this is just a reflection of who you guys are. And I'm no stranger to controversy. Ban the bomb, no war, I've been there. Where I haven't been is Twitter/FB flamewars. And you know how? I unfollow as soon as I don't like. It's not the end of the world.
- escaramujo 8y agoSounds like you just wanted to show us how great you are, even though it’s been demonstrated how these platforms do a lot of psychological tricks to hook you into flames and the like.
- complector 8y agoTo borrow the catch phrase from XKCD, sometimes, it's just that: Someone is WRONG on the internet. But there's a sort of natural conductivity/inductivity to social networks, that varies as you chain together personalities, and the dumber you go, the more emotive things get. Ask any lawyer, picking a jury usually involves pulling the dumbest, most incompetent people, while polling for their gut alignment, relative to case at hand. These are the most emotional, and likely most easily driven to judgement. They also usually lack power in their daily lives, and are eager for some trigger time, so to speak. So, now, put that on the internet. Pack these people together in clusters relative to their home towns and high schools, and never let them escape each other. Preserve every last memory, especially the most embarrassing ones that their family members can command, to bring an obnoxious personality to heel, if possible. Take everyone with a shit job, with company and store policies design to screw the customer. Ever call center goon, every cellular and wireless store clerk gunning for contract sign ups. Ask them what's wrong with the world. Now, randomly distribute agit prop into a flashing marquee on their home page, to gin them up, as they start cruising for love interests, and the unattainable crushes that taunt them on a daily basis. Give them parking tickets, too many bills to pay. Make them late with the rent. Get them pregnant. Welcome to Facebook.
- kqbx 8y agoI haven't been able to find the original files (probably not possible) but it looks like The Guardian has access to at least some of them too: https://www.theguardian.com/news/series/facebook-files https://www.theguardian.com/news/series/facebook-files Note that these were published on May 2017.
- bookofjoe 8y agoThe Times seems to have one or more Facebook employees feeding it confidential material in spite of Zuckerberg's threat to prosecute anyone caught doing so. Constant leak of documents/emails/etc.
- throw2016 8y agoThere is a lot of apologism for censorship on this thread in sharp contrast to the threads on china and others where they are demonized for the exact same thing. This is troubling as it seems when we do it commentators are ready with a litany of justifications in contrast to the blanket judgements on other discussions. This kind of double standards is abusive of discourse and the values sought to be defended and cannot then be a forum for informed discussion.
- John_KZ 8y agoHN is right-biased and quite nationalist.I'm always amused to realize that some people actually believe that Facebook's "moderation efforts" are a good think, while WeChat's or VK's are not. I mean, I get why an exec or a politician would have to say this in public, but come on, who actually buys this? Facebook is no less of a propaganda tool for an authoritarian elite than it's Chinese or Russian counterparts. And even if you're a nationalist American, don't forget that Facebook isn't really protecting your own interests.
- jgalt212 8y agoI would just shut down in these hard to govern, hard to monetize regions/countries. I know it's a bit step from "connecting the world" mantra, but it solves the problem.